If you are up for reading a book, the “show notes” point at several that are squarely about this. Varela, @evantthompson, & Rosch’s is probably the most readable!
There’s lots of ways of coming at this, and it’s hard to write up in less than a book and more than a phrase.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
In a phrase: what physical properties could a thing-in-your-head have that would make it represent the fact that Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso?
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
By 1990 it became apparent that no answer to that was possible, even in principle. Once you bite that bullet, the whole cognitivist project collapses.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
Then you can start to think about alternatives. There’s lots of appealing starting points, but so far none of them have led to a generative research program that can regularly crank out concrete substantive results. No “normal science” yet; it’s “pre-paradigm” in Kuhn’s terms.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
Somewhat relatedly: I find Culadasa’s appeals to cognitive science and/or neuroscience unconvincing and potentially misleading. Very short on details/footnotes; it seems to be a vague rehash of mainly 1980s-era stuff that has been discredited for decades.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
What do you have in mind in particular?
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Replying to @SpeakingSubject @OortCloudAtlas and
Well… a proper analysis would be a long post and would be interpreted as a nasty attack on a nice person. But, for example, >
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Replying to @Meaningness @SpeakingSubject and
He’s heavily influenced by Minsky’s 1985 _Society of Mind_, which he does cite (p441) although he gets Minsky’s first name wrong :(
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Replying to @Meaningness @SpeakingSubject and
I was a student of Minsky’s. He was a genius, and the book had a huge impact in 1985, but within a few years it was apparent that the theory is unworkable, and no one in cognitive science has taken it seriously since. It’s a fascinating historical curiosity of a dead end.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
I remember reading this book in the early 90s. In brief, why was his theory unworkable?
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It doesn’t ground into something specific enough to gain traction. There isn’t an in-principle failure, but none of the terms are definite enough to make it possible to take the project further, test it, implement it, or draw conclusions.
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